The selection of high-quality manuscripts

Abstract

In addition to the factor of impact and other bibliometric indices, generation of a net profit year on year plays a central role in measuring overall journal publishing performance. However, some business models do not allow the academic journals continue to thrive since they are not financially sustainable. It raises a number of questions which have to be answered: how does the journal’s wealth grow given a particular allocation strategy of journal resources? What is the optimal allocating strategy of journal resources that maximizes the growth rate of journal’s wealth? What is the value of the side information for the selection of high-quality manuscripts? And, what is the effective growth rate of journal’s wealth if there exists dependence among successive selections of high quality manuscripts? This paper proves that information theoretic quantities like entropy and mutual information arise as the answers to these fundamental questions in the selection of high-quality manuscripts and allocation of journal’s wealth. Based on the uncovered relationships between the growth rate of journal’s wealth and the selection of high-quality manuscripts, we propose a number of basic guidelines for improving the journal publishing performance (e.g., match probabilities of high quality when placing the allocations of journal resources among the submitted manuscripts and focus on management practices that promote selection processes with less uncertainty of the outcome).